Ex-congressman reveals why he’s STILL convinced US intelligence knew about the hijack plot for a YEAR before 9/11
Former US congressman Curt Weldon has renewed his long-standing claim that a secret Pentagon intelligence programme, Able Danger, identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and his associates more than a year before the attacks, but that warnings were blocked from reaching the FBI. Weldon, a ten-term Pennsylvania representative, says the claim cost him his political career and that his daughter's home was raided by the Department of Justice shortly before his 2006 re-election bid in what he calls a "deep state" effort to silence him. He and his daughter were never charged, and he is now going public ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Weldon says Able Danger used supercomputers to mine vast amounts of open-source internet data and had flagged Atta's "Brooklyn cell" well before September 2001, with analysts allegedly attempting at least three times by late 2000 to alert the FBI, only to be blocked by bureaucratic and legal obstacles. He notes the findings did not appear in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report, and that the Pentagon has previously said it could not verify his allegations, with a Defense Department spokesman describing the programme's material as only "general references" to terrorist cells. Weldon's book, Able Danger: What The 9/11 Commission Never Told You, is due for release on 22 September.
- Ex-congressman Curt Weldon revives claims about pre-9/11 intelligence failures
- Says Able Danger tracked hijacker Mohamed Atta over a year early
- Claims warnings to the FBI were blocked; new book out 22 September
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Weldon left Congress in 2007 after nearly two decades representing Pennsylvania in the US House. He is best known for pushing claims about Able Danger, a Pentagon data-analysis programme said to have used automated tools to sift large volumes of publicly available information for possible terrorism links in the years before the 9/11 attacks. Some military officers involved with the programme have said it identified hijacker Mohamed Atta before September 2001, though this has never been independently confirmed and does not appear in the official 9/11 Commission Report.
The 9/11 Commission was the body set up by Congress to investigate the failures that allowed the attacks to happen, and its 2004 report is generally treated as the authoritative account. Able Danger became a point of contention because, if accurate, it would suggest intelligence agencies had information on the plot earlier than officially acknowledged, and that this was not passed on or acted upon.
This matters because it touches on long-running questions about whether warning signs before 9/11 were missed or mishandled, and about trust in official inquiries. The story is resurfacing now, 25 years on, as Weldon publishes a new book restating his claims, which the Pentagon has previously said it could not verify.